This Companion examines the broad sweep of fiction-writing in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, from 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War, a period when novels in Britain were produced more cheaply, and read more widely, than ever before. All of the classics of the period are explored: Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Henry James's The Golden Bowl, E M Forster's A Room with a View, Conrad's Lord Jim, and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. The Companion also surveys a huge variety of neglected and forgotten books, and covers genres such as spy fiction and feminist fiction, and institutions such as the suburb, the publishing trade, and the literary agent. Significant social developments and themes are examined in topic entries, which allow the reader to explore all the novels in a particular genre. Notably, women writers make up nearly half of the biographical entries, reflecting the unprecedented number of women who began to publish during the period.

Indispensable for students and lovers of literature, the Companion offers unique access to the works, writers, and preoccupations of this absorbing period in history.

This Companion examines English-language writers and writing throughout the twentieth century, in all major genres and from all around the world. All the great literary figures are ...
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This Companion examines English-language writers and writing throughout the twentieth century, in all major genres and from all around the world. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean, among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T S Eliot, Derek Walcott, D H Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, Sylvia Plath, as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Anaïs Nin to L M Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are explored; also included are entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works. This is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature in English.

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